Customer Intelligence For Brick-and-Mortar Businesses

The competition in today's restaurant and retail industries is overwhelming. Each of your competitors are desperately seeking ways to seize their share of consumer dollars. That's why it's so important to stand out from the crowd when it comes to your marketing and advertising campaigns. And it's why you need to save on operational costs wherever possible.

You need to work smarter, not necessarily harder. And to do so you need one very important marketing component - accurate customer data.

Customer intelligence is the process of collecting customer data and analyzing it to identify customer personas, pain points, behavior and purchasing habits. Then you can individually target your marketing efforts to each of the personas, increasing engagement and ROI.

The data can also be used to lower operations costs as you make intelligent, data-driven purchasing and staffing decisions. It can also be used to make decisions about new products, or updates to existing ones.

To execute all of this, though, you need accurate and comprehensive data from a large sample size of your actual customer base.

In the past, this data was difficult to collect on your own, and very expensive when collected by a third-party company. Plus, you only received data from a small sample size of your customer base, and it was literally a snapshot in time of customer sentiment. If you ever wanted updated data, you had to continue paying for it.

Fortunately, the Bloom Intelligence WiFi marketing and customer intelligence hub can alleviate these roadblocks and get you on your way to using customer intelligence to rapidly grow your business and leave the competition behind.

Since the advent of the internet and the countless tools available to collect customer data online, ecommerce companies have had an advantage over brick-and-mortar businesses for decades. Bloom levels the playing field, allowing offline companies to collect customer data easily and without breaking the bank.

WiFi Analytics for Customer Intelligence

Bloom utilizes the guest WiFi access points at your physical locations. These access points are constantly scanning the area for patrons who have WiFi enabled on their smartphone, laptop or tablet. When one of these devices comes into range, your WiFi access point can identify each individual mobile device as it sends out its unique identifying code in its WiFi signal.

From that point on, Bloom will remember the device and store anonymous data about the device in the customer CRM database. Whenever the device comes into range, Bloom will recognize it by the unique identifying code and continue to log all activity on that device in the database.

Anonymous data includes daily traffic counts, first-time visitors, repeat visitors, dwell times and more. The data can be viewed in Bloom's user dashboard and can be viewed in any date span and for any location. Further, you can compare two different date spans or compare different locations or groups of locations.

While this can be powerful and valuable information to help you grow your business, it is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of true customer intelligence.

Advanced WiFi Analytics

When a user first logs into your WiFi using their email address or social media account, Bloom creates a new customer profile for that customer. Remember that the device has been tracked anonymously every time it has been within range of the WiFi access point. So when Bloom creates the customer profile for the patron, all previous (and future) data associated with that device is added to the customer profile. Even if the customer never logs into your WiFi again, their behavior data will continue to be added to their customer profile indefinitely.

Using progressive profiling, other data can be collected as well, such as birthdate (age), postal code, phone number, gender and more. Over time, restaurants and retail shops and chains can add countless thousands of customer profiles into their databases.

Using the Data - The Goal of Customer Intelligence

As we discussed above, customer intelligence involves collecting and then using the data to help with operational costs, marketing and advertising.

Once you grow your list of customer profiles and you have a baseline of data about the overall behavior of your customers, you can begin using the data to improve and measure various parts of your business.

For instance, now that you have an accurate visualization of your customer visit times, dwell times and repeat rates, you can more accurately predict future footfall metrics. This allows you to make data-driven decisions on how much staff to schedule on any given day, and at what times to have them clock in and out. Rising labor costs are an issue with many restaurants and chains today, and this will help you save on those costs.

Likewise, by analyzing your customer data, you can make more intelligent purchasing decisions. Knowing when your busiest days and times are can help avoid over-purchasing resulting in waste, or under-purchasing and running out crucial products.

On the marketing side, you'll be able to analyze the demographic and behavior data of your customers and begin forming ideal customer personas, such as women under 30 who visit on weekdays during lunch hours. Or, men over 40 who visit on Sundays during football season.

It's easy to see that having separate marketing campaigns targeted to each of these personas would be much more effective and engaging than sending a single message to all of them hoping that the message resonates with some of them.

Bloom makes it very simple and easy to configure, execute and measure these types of marketing campaigns. And all metrics are updated in real time, so there's no waiting to see how well your campaigns are performing. There are many other triggers that can be used, such as:

Birthday

Upon Exit

Upon Registration

Customer loyalty and milestones

Ratings upon exit

Anniversary and more

You can also send out one-off messages to individual customers or customer segments, or you can schedule recurring messages, as well.

To find out more about Bloom's customer intelligence platform, and how it can grow your business, schedule your free demo by calling 727-877-8181 or click here.